Notes.

10/04/2009

To glean a sense of the dimensions of the organisation department's job, conjure up a parallel body in Washington. The imaginary department would oversee the appointments of US state governors and their deputies; the mayors of big cities; heads of federal regulatory agencies; the chief executives of General Electric, ExxonMobil, Walmart and 50-odd of the remaining largest companies; justices on the Supreme Court; the editors of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, the bosses of the television networks and cable stations, the presidents of Yale and Harvard and other big universities and the heads of think-tanks such as the Brookings Institution and the Heritage Foundation.
All equivalent positions in China are filled by people appointed by the party through the organisation department. With a few largely symbolic exceptions, the people who fill these jobs are also party members. Not only that, the vetting process takes place behind closed doors and appointments are announced without any explanation about why they have been made. When the department knocks back candidates for promotion, it does so in secret as well.

08/29/2009

The evidence of Mohammed’s incompetence—found in more than five thousand pages of transcripts from her hearing—seems as unambiguous as the city’s lawyer promised in his opening statement: “These children were abused in stealth. . . . It was chronic . . . a failure to complete report cards. . . . Respondent failed to correct student work, failed to follow the mandated curriculum . . . failed to manage her class.” The independent observer’s final report supported this assessment, ticking off ten bullet points describing Mohammed’s unsatisfactory performance. (Mohammed’s lawyer argues that she began to be rated unsatisfactory only after she became active with the union.)

This was the thirtieth day of a hearing that started last December. Under the union contract, hearings on each case are held five days a month during the school year and two days a month during the summer. Mohammed’s case is likely to take between forty and forty-five hearing days—eight times as long as the average criminal trial in the United States. (The Department of Education’s spotty records suggest that incompetency hearings before the introduction of P.I.P. Plus generally took twenty to thirty days; the addition of the peer observer’s testimony and report seems to have slowed things down.) Jay Siegel, the arbitrator in Mohammed’s case, who has thirty days to write a decision, estimates that he will exceed his deadline, because of what he says is the amount of evidence under consideration. This means that Mohammed’s case is not likely to be decided before December, a year after it began. That is about fifty per cent more time, from start to finish, than the O.J. trial took...

The majority of the transcript of the twenty-nine previous hearing days was given over to the lawyers and the arbitrator arguing issues that included whether and how Mohammed should have known about the contents of the Teachers’ Reference Manual; whether it was admissible that when Mohammed got a memo from the principal complaining about her performance, her students said, she angrily read it aloud in class; whether it was really a bad thing that she had appointed one child in her class “the enforcer,” and charged him with making the other kids behave; whether Mohammed’s union representative should have been present when she was reprimanded for not having a lesson plan; and whether the independent observer was qualified to evaluate Mohammed, even though she came from the neutral consulting company that the union had approved.

When the bill for the arbitrator is added to the cost of the city’s lawyers and court reporters and the time spent in court by the principal and the assistant principal, Mohammed’s case will probably have cost the city and the state (which pays the arbitrator) about four hundred thousand dollars.

Nor is it by any means certain that, as a result of that investment, New York taxpayers will have to stop paying Mohammed’s salary, eighty-five thousand dollars a year. Arbitrators have so far proved reluctant to dismiss teachers for incompetence. Siegel, who is serving his second one-year term as an arbitrator and is paid fourteen hundred dollars for each day he works on a hearing, estimates that he has heard “maybe fifteen” cases. “Most of my decisions are compromises, such as fines,” he said. “So it’s hard to tell who won or lost.” Has he ever terminated anyone solely for incompetence? “I don’t think so,” he said. In fact, in the past two years arbitrators have terminated only two teachers for incompetence alone, and only six others in cases where, according to the Department of Education, the main charge was incompetence.

08/24/2009

The strength of the union and the weakness of management made it impossible to conduct business properly at any level. For instance, I had an employee who punched in his time card and then disappeared.

The rules were such that I had to spend hours documenting that he was not in his work area. I needed witnesses, timed reports, and plant wide searches all documented in detail.

After this absurdity I decided to go my own route; I called the corner bar and paged him and he came to the phone. He received a 30-day unpaid lay-off because he was a “repeat offender.”

When he returned, he thanked me for the paid vacation. I scoffed, until he explained: (1) He had tried to get the lay off because it was fishing season; (2) The UAW negotiated with GM to give him the time with pay.

One afternoon I was helping oversee the plant while upper management was off site. The workers brought an RV into the loading yard with a female “entertainer” who danced for them and then “entertained” them in the RV.

I went to Labor Relations for assistance. The Labor Relations rep pulled out the work rules and asked me which of the rules the men were breaking. None applied directly, of course. Who wrote work rules to cover prostitutes at lunch? There were no consequences.

Eventually, I was promoted to a management position at GM headquarters. As I left the plant, I gave my supervisor a blunt message. I told him that I expected the union to act like the union, but I was disappointed that management didn’t act like management.

08/12/2009

If people would just do four things -- engage in regular physical activity, eat a healthy diet, not smoke and avoid becoming obese -- they could slash their risk of diabetes, heart attack, stroke or cancer by 80%, a new report has found.But less than 10% of the 23,153 people in the multiyear study -- published in Monday’s Archives of Internal Medicine -- actually lived their lives this way.

"The study has such a simple straightforward focus on making the point that prevention works in preventing serious disease," said Dr. J. Leonard Lichtenfeld, deputy chief medical officer for the American Cancer Society.

"What really has been difficult is trying to figure out how to get people to take notice of the message and engage in healthy behaviors."

07/30/2009

A culture of widespread respect for police guarantees greater public safety and allows the police to use less force. They use less force in such a milieu because suspects are habituated to to submit, know that the community would side with the police, and those troublemakers who are willful and disorderly can be detained before things get out of hand. This both teaches them a lesson and serves to pour encourger les autres. This is the world that prevailed before the 1960s. It was a safer world with less violence. Police in those days were unironically praised, respected, honored, and given the benefit of the doubt. This culture of respect paid countless dividends, dividends given short shrift by the courts, the media, and now the President of the United States.

07/20/2009

A strangely fortunate by-product of the War on Poverty’s focus on minorities was that it largely insulated white America from the most destructive and demoralizing welfare programs and attitudes that retarded progress among many of the black and Hispanic poor. It shunted the New Deal welfare state onto a branch line, while England and Europe hurtled down the welfare state’s main line to much more widespread dependency and idleness, low growth, limited horizons, little innovation, and a grossly bloated public sector, with countless unproductive government drones gobbling up a porcine share of GDP and further constricting liberty through meddling, “fairness”-promoting diktats.
But in New York, with its vast population of the hereditary minority poor, we now have something less like the rest of America and more like the European welfare state: heavily and inequitably taxed; undemocratic, unsustainable, and largely pointless; with government telling us what to eat and where to smoke, using its total control of the school system to accomplish little beyond boosting costs dramatically, subsidizing or dictating the rents on half of the city’s rental apartments, forcing private health-insurance buyers to subsidize the care of the indigent, and prohibiting us from asking whether those who use the services we pay for are here legally. Our public services, even vital ones like the subway, work badly, because they operate less for the convenience of their users than for the sake of their unionized, overpaid employees, now not so much public servants as the public’s masters, through the vast political might they wield over so powerful a government.
On top of which, New York State, judged the “least free” in the nation in a new George Mason University study of personal and economic liberty, is quicker than the other 49 states to wield eminent domain to take away private property and give it to someone else, the absurd extreme of government-forced redistribution. Such unfreedom—along with “swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance”—would have driven the Founders to arms, but New Yorkers have no idea of how to reform a government that is essentially a one-party elective despotism with no checks and balances, and no democratic levers of change, such as voters’ initiatives and referenda. For us, the clearest solution is to leave, as millions of middle-class individuals and most of our Fortune 500 headquarters have done over the last half-century.

07/17/2009

In the fall I came back to Harvard with a nagging question. It was something like, Why did there seem to be more honor and decency in those uneducated black farmers in rural Mississippi than there was, and I mean no offense, among my fellow graduate students at Harvard? Many of my fellow students shared my altruistic left-liberal political opinions, but what struck me was that, in their own lives, they were all out for number one. They all wanted to see their names in lights, and were happy to elbow each other aside in pursuit of professional rewards. They were prototypical limousine liberals. Their compassionate concern for others cost them nothing, while they lived high and fast. The only explanations I could offer were that the black farmers were religious and churchgoing or that their virtues were the product of a simple life of poor but honest farming. Now, if either were true, then it called into question my intuitive belief that education and scientific and technological progress would put an end to superstition, suffering, and poverty, enabling human beings to realize their underlying morally good nature, and that finally all good things would walk hand in hand into the sunset.

A framed photograph of Michael Jackson brought by Jill Huizar of Portage sits in front of Greg Packer of Huntington, N.Y., as he waves in the newcomers to his front gate spot at the Steel Yard today. Packer flew to Chicago, spent the night at the Greyhound station and rode the South Shore train to arrive early for the Michael Jackson memorial.

07/11/2009

Here are some of his victims: golden-blond P.R. floozies from California, good ol’ hunting boys from Alabama, and a couple of Southern pastors who specialize in converting homosexuals. Does anything strike you about that list? So clearly have they been picked for their mockability that Baron Cohen is left with nothing to prove...Baron Cohen, having sneaked his way into a discussion, seldom has the nerve to keep his side of the bargain, preferring to cut things short with a gibe...

I realized, watching “Borat” again, that what it exposed was not a vacuity in American manners but, more often than not, a tolerance unimaginable elsewhere. Borat’s Southern hostess didn’t shriek when he appeared with a bag of feces; she sympathized, and gently showed him what to do...I feel that the patsy, though gulled, comes off better than the gag man; the joke is on Baron Cohen, for foisting indecency on the decent. The joker is trumped by the square.

Here’s the deal, apparently: if celebrities aren’t famous enough for your liking (Ron Paul, Paula Abdul), or seem insufficiently schooled in irony, you make vicious sport of them, but if they’re A-listers, insanely keen to be in on the joke, they can join your congregation. Would Baron Cohen dare to adopt a fresh disguise and trap Sting in some outlandish folly, or is he now too close a friend? To scour the world for little people you can taunt, and then pal up with the hip and rich: that is not an advisable path for any comic to pursue, let alone one as sharp and mercurial as Baron Cohen.

Calvin was not an autocratic monarchist but preferred "mixed" government combining monarchical, aristocratic and popular elements. A number of his successors developed his political theology in a more radical direction, laying the basis for popular participation and eventually movements of democratisation: believers empowered to speak and lead in the church would become citizens empowered in the polity. And Calvin's notion of divine law standing over every human institution in time prompted the idea that each institution limited the other. Contrary to popular perceptions, Calvinism can be credited with contributing to the emergence of modern constitutional democracy.

Not wishing to appear softer on arch-heretics than Catholic Vienne (which had already burnt his effigy), the Council sentenced him to death. Calvin’s request to substitute the sword for the customary auto-da-fé was overruled. Servetus was barbarically burnt at the stake.

Calvin’s role — drafting the charges and acting as a theological witness — cannot be excused. It’s a dark blot on his career. His contemporary critic, a champion of religious toleration, Sebastian Castellio, stated a rule Calvin ought to have known and heeded: “To burn a man is not to defend a doctrine, but simply to slay a man.”

These two matters greatly overshadow, yet do not eclipse, Calvin’s achievements. Calvin accomplished what other reformers failed to achieve: a significant reformation of manners and morals, gaining for Geneva a reputation as the very model of a Protestant reformed community. This was achieved by distinguishing the roles of church and state, and placing discipline under the control of the church through a consistory made up of pastors and elected lay elders. This non-hierarchical, egalitarian structure was exported to other reformed churches from Scotland to Hungary. The consistory functioned as a kind of incubator of democratic ideas.

Calvinism is actually in the main a redoing of Augustinianism, the theology of St. Augustine. It's not actually a distinctively Protestant form of theologizing at all. But Calvin deserves full marks for working out the logical implications of Augustinianism to the nth degree and adding some new wrinkles.

Above all for me, he is to be respected for understanding that Biblical theology can only be done on the basis of a detailed and comprehensive exegesis of all the relevant Biblical material...

He lived by Bengel's maxim-- Apply the whole of the text (of the Bible) to yourself. Apply the whole of yourself to the text. Its a motto any Christian should be proud to live by.

But by the middle of the century, the more modest views of providence that until that time had dominated throughout the mid-Atlantic and Southern colonies had been supplanted by the stringent Calvinism of Massachusetts and Connecticut. America was New Englandized. According to historian John F. Berens, the motor behind this extraordinary transformation was the Great Awakening of the 1740s, which helped to spread theological concepts throughout the colonies. In the electrifying sermons of George Whitefield, Jonathan Edwards, Gilbert Tennent, Samuel Davies, and many other preachers, colonists from New York to South Carolina encountered for the first time the potent providential ideas that had previously transfixed the minds of the Puritan settlers of New England.

Not that these ideas were identical to the ones that originally inspired John Winthrop, Cotton Mather, and other seventeenth-century writers. On the contrary, American providential thinking evolved dramatically as it circulated throughout the colonies. As Berens notes, the French and Indian War (1754-1763), which followed immediately on the heels of the Great Awakening, contributed decisively to the transformation. For the first time, Americans began to define themselves in contrast to a vision of tyranny -- namely, the (political and religious) absolutism of Catholic France. Unlike France, they concluded, the American colonies were a bastion of political and religious freedom. This freedom had been won, moreover, with the help of God's providence, which would continue to protect the colonies in times of danger, provided the colonists proved themselves worthy of it by maintaining their divinely favored civil and religious institutions.

07/10/2009

Calvin's infamous role in the trial and death of Michael Servetus, condemned and burned as a heretic in Geneva in 1553, shocked the conscience of the Protestant community. Many accused the Protestant leaders in Geneva of adopting the "popish" ways of the Catholic Church. Sebastian Castellio, a linguist and colleague, broke with Calvin over the principle of religious toleration: "I do not see how we can retain the name of Christian," Castellio said, "if we do not imitate His clemency and mercy."...

"They did not usually act as if they believed what their own theology said about the huge gap between divine omniscience and human finitude," writes Notre Dame historian Mark Noll, "nor did they seem to really believe their own claim that even believers continued to abuse the gifts of God for idolatrous, selfish ends."

Thus, John Calvin and the Reformed tradition he launched were simultaneously medieval and modern. Much like his Catholic antagonists, Calvin viewed the political and religious realms as part of an unbroken spiritual unity. For all his theological innovation, he never imagined that the church could maintain its fidelity to the truth without the assistance of the state.

The legacy of the French theologian, they say, is a city that even today is passionless, moralistic and dull, where it is forbidden to make a noise after 10pm and restaurant kitchens close at 9pm on the dot...

Andrew Stallybrass, a lay preacher in Geneva who works for a foundation promoting inter-cultural dialogue, sums up Calvin’s economic philosophy as: “Money is a good thing but don’t flaunt it. Invest it for the public good and don’t screw the poor.”...

Though he enforced strict moral rules, including bans on swearing, gambling, fornication and even dancing, the same snooper system for reporting transgressors was also used to help the poor and sick. “It worked as a social service for the city,” Ms Graesslé says. Calvin also pioneered universal education, including for girls, so all would find meaning in the Bible, and founded what later became Geneva University.

Pulitzer prize-winning novelist Marilynne Robinson wrote: "Any reader of the Institutes must be struck by the great elegance, the gallantry, of its moral vision, which is more beautiful for the resolution with which its theology embraces sorrow and darkness."

Calvin is a moral realist. For all their created nobility, human beings are tragic figures, impaled on their own pride. That is why, although Calvin upheld the freedom of the individual conscience, he was also an advocate of collective and democratic decision making. It is not accidental that his followers have been some of the greatest promoters of republicanism and democracy in the modern era.

Calvin was not without flaws, some of them serious. Yet if we are to judge him cruel, we are failing to recognise that he was a man of remarkable moderation in an age of often extreme judicial cruelty. If we are to judge his view of humanity too bleak, we are seriously overestimating our own capacity for moral heroism. If we are to celebrate the waning of his influence, it is quite possibly because we have accepted too lazily the caricature of his critics. As Robinson reminds us: "There are things for which we in this culture clearly are indebted to him, including relatively popular government, the relatively high status of women, the separation of church and state, what remains of universal schooling and, while it lasted, liberal higher education, education in the humanities. How easily we forget."

How can we know when the tide of respectable opinion has decisively turned against the teachers' unions? When a panel that includes Father Hesburgh, Birch Bayh. Bill Bradley, Eleanor Holmes Norton and Roger Wilkins goes medieval on them, saying their resistance to reforms designed to hold schools accountable has hurt "disadvantaged students" and led to "calcified systems in which talented people are deterred from applying or staying as teachers ..."

The unions have battled against the principle that schools and education agencies should be held accountable for the academic progress of their students. They have sought to water down the standards adopted by states to reflect what students should know and be able to do. They have attacked assessments designed to measure the progress of schools, seeking to localize decisions about test content so that the performance of students in one school or community cannot be compared with others. They have resisted innovative ways-such as growth models-to assess student performance.

In their attack on education reform, the national unions have often been unconstrained by considerations of propriety and fairness. They have sought to inject weakening amendments in appropriations bills, hoping that they would prevail if no hearings were held and the public was unaware of their efforts. They have used the courts to launch an attack on education reform, employing arguments that could imperil many federal assistance programs going back to the New Deal. They have failed to inform their own members of the content of federal reform laws.

06/25/2009

Jonathan Mahler's story in the NYT magazine describes workers at a UAW plant -- a strange world in which less is demanded of a person than at an average job, in return for which the pay and benefits are much higher. The reader is invited to have sympathy for these privileged few. Excerpts:

By the mid-1990s, though, with the Big Three losing market share and staggering under the weight of their union contracts, it became difficult to find assembly-line work in a plant, particularly if you didn’t have a personal connection to the company. Hiring was governed almost exclusively by nepotism. If an automaker was looking to add workers, it invited existing employees to pass along a referral sheet — essentially a one-page job application — to a friend or relative. Nearly all of the autoworkers under the age of 40 whom I met in Detroit found their jobs through a family member. [What could be more sympathetic than workers who get high-paying jobs by virtue of family connections, after a one -page application...]

[...]

A practicing Christian, Powell was taken aback by what he saw taking place around him. The plant was a world of temptations unto itself, with drugs, alcohol, numbers runners, bookies and even “parking-lot girls” who would come to the plant during lunch breaks to service male workers. “Anything you can find outside the plant, you can find inside the plant,” Powell says. “You either get caught up in it, or stay apart from it.” [I know that every workplace I ever encountered has had "parking lot girls" -- it makes for the epitome of a professional, respectable environment.]

[...]

Powell gradually settled in at Pontiac Assembly and was soon piling on as much overtime as he could. In a good week, he worked four 12-hour days and a 16-hour day. Overtime was especially abundant between the beginning of November and Christmas, when hunting season caused rampant absenteeism at the plant. [If I cared a lot about my job and were concerned about my career, I would definitely be sure to go AWOL every year at hunting season...]

[...]

One 38-year-old former Chrysler employee I met, who accepted a buyout package last fall — $50,000 and a $25,000 car voucher — had burned through all of the cash by May and still hadn’t been on a single job interview. I wondered how much longer he would be able to afford to put gas in the brand-new Aspen S.U.V. he bought with his voucher. [This sounds like an extremely responsible person with excellent judgment who certainly deserves a bailout and public sympathy because he's a "worker"]

[...]

After graduating from a magnet high school in the city, Shirese said, she took out loans to attend Northwood University and soon transferred to Eastern Michigan University. During her sophomore year, she dropped out after souring on the party scene. [...]

After high school, Powell enrolled at Wayne State University in Detroit and was planning to major in mass communications and broadcasting, but he dropped out halfway toward his degree. He wasn’t the most focused student. [...]

(Powell’s brother, Aaron, attended Winston-Salem State University on a basketball scholarship, but never graduated and now works at a Pepsi bottling plant in Detroit.) [These really aren't the greatest life decisions to be making...]

06/02/2009

I think a fundamental failure is the application of these concepts to this job as if these men were garbage collectors. This is a command position of a First Responder agency. The books you see piled on my desk are fire science books. These men face life threatening circumstances every time they go out. ... Please look at the examinations. ... You need to know: this is not an aptitude test. This is a high-level command position in a post-9/11 era no less. They are tested for their knowledge of fire, behavior, combustion principles, building collapse, truss roofs, building construction, confined space rescue, dirty bomb response, anthrax, metallurgy, and I opened my district court brief with a plea to the court to not treat these men in this profession as if it were unskilled labor. We don't do this to lawyers or doctors or nurses or captains or even real estate brokers. But somehow they treat firefighters as if it doesn't require any knowledge to do the job.

Firefighters die every week in this country. ... [There was a case ] a few miles away where a young father and firefighter Eddie Ramos died after a truss roof collapsed in a warehouse fire because the person who commanded the scene decided to send men into an unoccupied house, with no people to save on Thanksgiving Day, with a truss roof known to collapse early in the fire because of the nature of the pins that hold the trusses together would have collapsed. And for 20 minutes he couldn't find any air and he he suffocated to death. And the fire chief had to go tell a 6 year-old that her father wasn't coming home. I'm not being histrionic. That happens all the time, and if you can't pass a competency exam and answer substantive job knowledge questions, I think that the only compelling governmental interest or Title 7 interest I see--

05/27/2009

Popular etymology in France declares that arobase [@] is actually a contraction of the phrase ‘à rond bas’, where ‘bas’ stands for ‘bas-de-casse’, a bit of printing terminology that refers to lower-case letters, and that it’s somehow therefore related to the word ‘arabesque’. This legerdemain is clearly nonsense but it’s no less crazy than the various cutesy attempts by languages across the world to naturalise the sign by making it an animal emblem: in Korean it’s apparently a snail, in Danish an elephant’s trunk, in Turkish a ram, in Hungarian a maggot, in many Slavonic languages a monkey, apart from in Russian, where – inexplicably – it’s a dog.

Reading such poems, it is easy to forget that their audience was precisely the well-connected literati who staffed the imperial bureaucracy, and that each of these poets eagerly pursued an official career. Even a poet such as Meng Hao-Jan--who, Hinton writes, "never left his native region to follow a government career," but "cultivated the independence of a simple life in his home mountains"--knows that he is writing for the capital: one of his poems is titled "Sent to Ch'ao, the Palace Reviser," and contrasts the bureaucrat's "rue- scented libraries" with his own "bamboo-leaf gardens." Wang Wei came from a prominent family and rose to a high position in the bureaucracy. For Hinton, however, this is essentially irrelevant to his poetry: "Wang enjoyed a long and successful career in the government ... but it is clear that he found his truest self in mountain solitude." Likewise, Wei Ying-Wu, who "never left government service completely," was still "by nature a recluse." All this is entirely in keeping with Hinton's view of Chinese poets as teachers of Taoist-Buddhist wisdom.

But there is another way to look at these poets. It is possible to see them as worldly and sophisticated men who--like Horace, or like the Elizabethan court poets--found it creditable to praise rusticity, without intending to practice it unless bad luck and old age compelled them to do so. (If it is a sort of Stoicism that these poets seem to espouse, it is worth remembering that the great Stoics of Rome, Seneca and Cicero, spent their lives in the corridors of power.) As Stephen Owen notes, "Most High T'ang poets either served the state or wished to do so: the disdain for high office expressed by many famous poets was sporadic, and rarely accompanied by the conviction of action when an attractive opportunity for service was offered." This is not a question of hypocrisy or bad faith, but of the complex ways in which ideals and realities shape each other for any individual in any culture. It is telling that one of the standard subjects of Chinese poetry was visiting a remote monastery: they were good places to visit, but would the poet really want to live there? If he did, who would see his poetry?

05/21/2009

Now, we have a budget crisis, and California voters are unwilling to give Sacramento a pass. Why?

Maybe they don’t think they are getting value for their increased investment in government. California spent about $2,173 per resident (2000 dollars) in the 1997-1988 budget. The 2007-2008 budget spends about $2,738 (2000 dollars) per resident. That represents a 26 percent increase in real (inflation adjusted) per-capita spending in ten years.

What have California voters purchased with their 26 percent increase in government spending? Are the roads 26 percent better? Are schools 26 percent better? What is 26 percent better?

That is Sacramento’s problem. It is very hard to identify what good that this increase in spending has purchased. If it has been a good investment, why haven’t California’s leaders convinced the voters?

05/18/2009

The aspiring professionals who attend and staff elite Catholic universities tend to identify with other upwardly mobile young people, focused on career and lifestyle choices. But the vast majority of Catholics, to whom Catholic universities ultimately must answer, seek in Catholic culture the strength with which to confront the urgent concerns of ordinary life.

One could offer here a number of analogies, of varying accuracy. Take divorce in detective stories, for example. In mystery novel after mystery novel through the 1950s, there existed an accepted trope that a reasonable motive for the murder of, say, a wife was that she was a Catholic and so would never give her philandering husband the divorce he wanted. It didn’t matter that Catholics were, in fact, divorcing at nearly the same rate as everyone else in those years; what mattered was the trope: the cultural identity of Catholics as people who do not divorce.

Friday abstinence might be another analogy: the cultural identification of Catholics with their fish eating. This was a universally recognized marker, a sign of Catholic culture to Catholic and non-Catholic alike. Regardless of how much theology and liturgy were reformed by Vatican II, the loss of Friday abstinence may have caused more changes in Catholic culture than anything else attempted in the aftermath of the council.
Of course, Friday fish eating was never as central to Catholic thought as opposition to abortion is now. Even rejection of divorce was not as central, though it, too, involved defense of the family.

A better analogy might be the role that veneration of the Blessed Virgin played in Catholic culture through the 1950s. Protestants always felt there was something deeply wrong with Catholicism’s treatment of Mary, but—as many Catholic theologians pointed out—the Protestant complaint never precisely fit official Catholic theology on the point. That doesn’t mean, however, that the Protestants were wrong. They understood, in fact, that the Blessed Virgin occupied a cultural place for Catholics that official Catholic theology did not fully express.

Indeed, the analogy with the cultural role of abortion gains strength when we remember that the Marian doctrines were not forced down on the Church by intellectuals or the hierarchy. Well into the nineteenth century, Catholic theologians and the Vatican generally resisted the movement. The importance of Mary— her symbols and the strong definition of the Marian doctrines—was pushed from below: given to the hierarchy by the sense of the faithful.

That much is true of opposition to abortion. In an important essay in the Fall 2005 issue of Human Life Review, the historian George McKenna demonstrated the surprising withdrawal of the bishops from the political fight over abortion in the crucial years from 1979 to 1983—and maybe all the way to 1998, when the American bishops finally issued a pastoral letter that sharply separated the life issues from other concerns. The cultural centrality of opposition to abortion in America was not pushed down from above; it was forced on the reluctant bishops by the sense of the faithful, and that forcing took almost twenty years to accomplish.

05/06/2009

For seven years, the Los Angeles Unified School District has paid Matthew Kim a teaching salary of up to $68,000 per year, plus benefits.
His job is to do nothing.

Every school day, Kim's shift begins at 7:50 a.m., with 30 minutes for lunch, and ends when the bell at his old campus rings at 3:20 p.m. He is to take off all breaks, school vacations and holidays, per a district agreement with the teacher's union. At no time is he to be given any work by the district or show up at school.

THE TOP priority for state education officials in 2008 is to close the academic achievement gap between white and minority students. But given a chance to do so last month, the state Board of Education retreated...

The one school that got shot down - the International Charter School of Southeastern Massachusetts - was the largest and boldest. Its rejection raises thorny questions about just how hard the Patrick administration is willing to push to achieve equity in education...

Acting Commissioner Jeffrey Nellhaus recommended approval of the SABIS proposal, but Board of Education chairman Paul Reville voiced sharp concerns. And the board listened to Reville, rejecting the Brockton SABIS school by a 7-2 vote.
But when the board jettisoned SABIS, it also unintentionally abandoned minority families in more than a dozen communities. SABIS is one of the few educational systems in the state where minority students not only perform on par with white students, but outperform them, as well. That accomplishment, combined with the fact that there is little charter school activity in Southeastern Massachusetts, should have balanced out other concerns with the application.

By high school, minority students in Massachusetts lag their white counterparts by more than 30 percentage points in math and English on the state's high-stakes Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System test. But that is not the case at the Springfield SABIS school, where 94 percent of black 10th graders and 84 percent of Hispanics scored in the proficient or advanced categories on the English section of the 2007 MCAS. That compares with 77 percent of white students statewide. In math, the school's minority students are catching up nicely to their white counterparts. The board erred when it rejected an opportunity for minority students to traverse the gap that swallows so many...The 1,500-student SABIS school in Springfield has a waiting list of 2,677, the longest of any of the 61 charter schools in the state, according to the state's Charter School Association.

With the pillars of reform under attack, Joe Williams, executive director of Democrats for Education Reform, wrote in the Globe, “You have to wonder why Massachusetts seems intent on retreating from its own nationally recognized success. The backward slide is already evident.”

The Commonwealth’s 15-year track record of successful education reform gave Governor Patrick a clear path ahead on education policy. Instead of undoing the reforms of his predecessors, the governor could have built on the state’s success by carrying on the commitment to high standards, fine-tuning a successful accountability system, and maintaining the governance structure that had successfully insulated critical education policy decisions from special-interest pressure. He could extend to others the educational opportunity that transformed his own life by raising from 9 to 20 percent the cap on the amount of money that can be transferred from school districts to charter schools in districts whose MCAS scores are in the bottom 10 percent statewide.

So far, he has chosen instead to dismantle reform and replace the singular focus on student achievement that was the key to education reform’s success with a wish list that would likely cost taxpayers an additional $2 billion per year. With the new Board of Elementary and Secondary Education stripped of independence, there is no entity left that can operate outside the political arena with the sole mission of improving academic performance.

Results released in September 2008 showed a sharp drop in MCAS pass rates and flat or declining scores in the elementary and middle school grades and in many urban districts. While 15 years of progress will not be undone overnight, as the Patrick administration’s efforts to dismantle reform continue, such drops are likely to become the rule. It is the price we will pay for Massachusetts policymakers snatching defeat from the jaws of the Commonwealth’s historic education-reform victory.

Controversy flared recently when the Massachusetts Department of Education asked its Educational Personnel Advisory Council to review why many minority teacher candidates fail the state's licensure exams. On the Communication and Literacy Skills test administered during the 2005-06 school year, 77 percent of white teacher candidates passed the Communication section, compared with just 48 percent of Hispanic and 46 percent of African-American test-takers. On the Literacy section, 86 percent of white test takers passed, compared with 62 percent of African-American and 61 percent of Hispanic candidates.

The figures are even more troubling because, in terms of difficulty, teacher tests tend to be at the high school level. In a 1999 journal article published by The Education Trust, Ruth Mitchell and Patte Barth examined a number of teacher tests, and judged the difficulty to be at the "8th- to 10th- (sometimes 7th-) grade level."

05/03/2009

Judith Perez, principal of Hancock Park Elementary School in Los Angeles, recalled a situation in which a fellow principal had one more teacher than he needed. Under union rules, the teacher with the least seniority was to be transferred. Instead, the principal pushed out a poorly performing veteran by threatening to make her life miserable with frequent observations of her classes, Perez said.

The teacher ended up at Perez's school. When Perez called the principal for information, he quickly apologized. "I'm so sorry," she recalled him saying.

Perez soon found out why, concluding that her new teacher was "a total incompetent. . . . She had no idea how to conduct a lesson in reading or math."

Perez committed herself to either making this teacher improve or forcing her out.

"I was a [teachers] union leader," Perez said. "I believe in teachers' rights and protections. . . . But my bottom line is I'm in this profession for children. . . . Basically, I dedicated my year to getting rid of this teacher."

She kept a detailed diary, conducted a series of formal meetings with the teacher and her union representatives -- all called for under the teachers' contract -- and finally persuaded the woman to quit.

The district wanted to fire a high school teacher who kept a stash of pornography, marijuana and vials with cocaine residue at school, but a commission balked, suggesting that firing was too harsh. L.A. Unified officials were also unsuccessful in firing a male middle school teacher spotted lying on top of a female colleague in the metal shop, saying the district did not prove that the two were having sex.

The district fared no better in its case against elementary school special education teacher Gloria Hsi, despite allegations that included poor judgment, failing to report child abuse, yelling at and insulting children, planning lessons inadequately and failing to supervise her class.

Not a single charge was upheld. The commission found the school's evaluators were unqualified because they did not have special education training. Moreover, it said they went to the class at especially difficult periods and didn't stay long enough.

Four years after the district began trying to fire Hsi, the case is still tied up in court, although she has been removed from the classroom. Her lawyer declined to comment on her behalf. The district's legal costs so far: $110,000.

Classroom ineffectiveness is hard to prove, administrators and principals said. "One of the toughest things to document, ironically, is [teachers'] ability to teach," Wallace, the Daniel Webster principal, said. "It's an amorphous thing."